Molly Roberts described the events in the courtroom during Cable News Network, Inc. v. Trump, a hearing to determine whether the temporary restraining order U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly granted CNN following the Trump administration’s revocation of their White House access should be converted to a preliminary injunction. The plaintiffs argued the ban was viewpoint discrimination, while the Justice Department explained the plaintiffs had failed to contest by their deadline and were on notice not to publish classified information.
Loren Voss reviewed Kori Schake’s book “The State and the Soldier,” in which Schake argued that the U.S. military has never posed a threat to civilian governance. Voss highlighted the author’s historical account of military officers acting politically and the book’s conclusion that these examples are rare due to strong military professionalism. Voss argued that military professionalism alone cannot sustain healthy civil-military relations and noted how civilian leaders must also be constrained in how they exert power over the military.
Ilya Somin argued that President Trump’s recent use of Section 338 of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act to impose 50 percent tariffs on some Canadian goods—and ban others outright—does not signal that the president has unlimited power to restrict imports. Somin added that Congress, not the president, has authority over import restrictions and tariffs, and statutes that may delegate this power to the president are limited in scope.
On Lawfare Daily from last week's Lawfare Live, Natalie Orpett sat down with Scott Anderson, Roberts, Anna Bower, Roger Parloff, and Eric Columbus to discuss the latest developments in litigation surrounding the Trump administration—including a lawsuit challenging the Iran War, updates on litigation over the cancellation of foreign aid funds, and more.
On Rational Security, Anderson sat down with Wittes, Roberts, and Molly Reynolds to talk through the week’s big national security news, including the White House’s pocket rescission of federal funding appropriated by Congress, the Trump administration’s efforts to reshape U.S. elections, an incident of plague at a biological research institute in Siberia, and more.
On Lawfare Live, Friday, Oct. 9, at 4 p.m. ET, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Roberts, Bower, Parloff, and Columbus to discuss the preliminary injunction hearing in CNN’s lawsuit against the Trump administration; oral arguments in the Harvard University lawsuits over grants being cut by the administration and new visa restrictions; court-appointed U.S. attorney Roger Rogoff agreeing to stay out of office until the appeal is decided; and more.
On Lawfare Daily, Anderson sat down with Omar Mohammed, Doug Silliman, and Victoria Taylor to discuss the recent withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Iraq 23 years after the U.S.-led invasion and occupation. The group considered whether the current Iraqi government is up to preventing a resurgence of ISIS and what lessons can be drawn from this experience and prior withdrawal in 2011.
On Lawfare Daily, Daniel Byman sat down with Peter Bergen to discuss counterterrorism in the 25 years after 9/11 and the many mistakes the United States and al-Qaeda made, as well as some of their surprising successes. Bergen also draws upon past lessons to understand the war in Iran and how the U.S. could better respond to a future terrorist attack.
On Lawfare Daily, Julia Curlee sat down with Shawn Howard and Ariane Tabatabai to consider how the Gulf states are coping with a war they didn’t start: the Iran War. They discussed why U.S. protection has made the Gulf states targets, how Tehran sees them, Iran’s strikes on the mediators, the possibility of a United Arab Emirates side deal, and what a post-midterm return to U.S. bombing would mean for the region.
Stefan Soesanto described connections between Ukraine’s military intelligence service (GUR) and a hacktivist group calling itself the Cyber Corps. Soesanto outlined a pattern of circumstantial evidence—linking the GUR to the Cyber Corps—including the Cyber Corps’ selective claiming of GUR-linked operations and its absorption of members of the volunteer IT Army of Ukraine, that collectively suggests a relationship between the two organizations.
Simon Goldstein and Peter N. Salib argued that because concerns about Chinese competition are common objections to pausing AI research, any plan to pace AI development must include a deal China may accept. Goldstein and Salib explained that to pace frontier AI development, the U.S. must trade its policy of limiting China through chip restrictions for a mutual agreement between the two countries to slow AI development.
Lisa Klaassen argued that the U.S. government defends American AI labs for training models on copyrighted work while branding Chinese labs a national security threat for distilling American models. Klaassen explained that these two positions cannot both be true, and Washington has yet to settle whether model outputs are legally protected.
Renée DiResta described how actors linked to Iran, Russia, China, and other countries use artificial intelligence (AI) to produce propaganda content and automate their workflows, but there is little evidence that AI-generated influence operations are swaying public opinion. DiResta argued that although AI is increasing the capacity of these campaigns, it cannot manufacture trusted distributors, and she called for transparency reports spanning the chain from creation to distribution.
Ceren Fitoz described how her team at the University of California, Berkeley’s Human Rights Center analyzed six terabytes of leaked internal Mexican military emails for an investigation into the targeting of journalists and human rights defenders. Fitoz illustrated how despite limited resources and technical setbacks, the group examined this data using network analysis tools; patterns in the military’s emails, signatures, and file paths; and an AI-designed search tool.
Matthew Cavedon and Laura Bondank-Harmon described the apparatus of Flock’s AI-enabled surveillance tools and other technologies, such as license readers, drones, and smart cameras, and noted that the Supreme Court has yet to determine whether many of these practices qualify as searches or seizures under the Fourth Amendment. The authors recommended policy changes—such as search warrants and ending qualified immunity—in combination with enforcement by the courts to protect civil liberties.
Kevin Frazier interviewed Audrey Tang about the use of citizens’ assemblies in AI governance. Tang argued that assemblies should name up front who must act on their recommendations, and that frontier AI labs should fund community evaluations and publish how they handle public input. Tang also explained that although AI can automate clerical work, substantive work—the recruitment of participants, decision-making, and the response to an assembly—should be handled by humans.
On Scaling Laws, Frazier sat down with Hélène Landemore and examined who should decide the uses for AI. The pair discussed why decisions about AI’s purpose, limits, and governance should not be left solely to elected officials, technical experts, and the companies building the systems. Landemore explained key ideas such as the fundamentals of deliberative democracy, sortition, and citizens’ assemblies.
And that was the week that was.
